Hard to believe these guys had better service when they made me use USPS than Google does when they don’t make me get off of the couch. (Photo: Bloomberg file)

It’s getting harder to use the things that I think I own. That’s not a great customer experience.

This morning, I played a CD at home. Because I didn’t physically take the CD or CD player to work with me, my wife, who works from our home, obviously has the option of listening to it while I’m at work.

A couple of years ago, when I listened to music primarily via iTunes, I had a lot of MP3s on my desktop computer. Through iTunes, I shared my library on my home network and my wife could play the music that we owned on her computer, too.

Now, I’m split between using physical copies — CDs and vinyl — and cloud-based services like Google Play, with music I own, and Spotify, with music I don’t own. Most of the music I own is most easily accessed digitally, because many CDs are buried in boxes. But when I’m at work, because my Google Play content is accessed via my personal Google account, my wife can’t listen to it. Reached by phone (not easy, but easier than I expected it to be), Google Play support confirmed that the only way for us to share music is to manually upload it to each of our accounts, and if and when we buy music through the Google Play store, to download it and upload it to the other person’s account. My customer service rep called this “side-loading.” Read more…

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